Jenny Saville: up, down and back under the spell

I don’t make a habit of looking at old pictures of myself, but there’s one I sometimes return to. I’m 18 and I’ve just won the school art prize. I’ve been given a book, Jenny Saville’s 2005 monograph. I’m clinging to it like a Titanic life raft, with an elastic smile that could only be youthful faith; that one day I could be just like the artist on its pages.

The book is now battered from years of frenzied leafing. Its cover is loose and its pages are fused with blobs of umbers, ochres and siennas; traces of many futile attempts to imitate the sorcery of turning paint into flesh.

It was published when Saville was 35, in the tailwind of her meteoric rise to stardom under the wing of young British art’s fairy godfather, Charles Saatchi. While Hirst was pickling livestock and Emin was airing her dirty laundry, Saville was capturing the searing discomfort of occupying a body; the vulnerability of flesh against a sterile, merciless world. The book is a bloody abattoir of modification and transformation, self-inflicted and otherwise: gender reassignment, cosmetic surgery, pathology, skin grafts, elephantiasis, conjoined heads and disease. There is a recurring sense that her subjects are plotting an exit from themselves – their bodies are worn like costumes, and look worn out by living, growing, loving, dying and fucking as scaffolded sacks of meat.

Saville’s magic is not what she applies to canvas. It is what she engineers to climb off it and under the skin of all those in its sight line. Few have articulated the intoxication of these works to a satisfactory degree, and I am not the first to observe that any attempt at imposing interpretation might dilute their power. The literature surrounding Saville is often evasive, looped and frequented by words like ‘meaty’, ‘visceral’, ‘grotesque’ and ‘fleshy’, with comparisons to Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud ad nauseam. Nothing seems to touch the sides. Saville’s currency is not words, but sensation. Being with her paintings is a deeply solitary, non-verbal experience. They do that to you – make you feel like the only girl in the room.

But like many love affairs, particularly those in which one party is entirely unaware of the other’s existence, there are ups and downs. The first tiff was in 2016; the source of the conflict was texture. In the Saville I fell for, much of the wizardry lived on the surface; vast canvases that could swallow you whole and suffocate with chasms of impasto. The show involved charcoal and pastel works. Their scale did little to envelop, and there was little sense of that undulating skin, just uncertain lines that began as one figure’s leg and ended at another’s groin. There was a lukewarm transparency; questions, not statements. Too gentle, too beautiful, less human.

In 2020, another knock: this time, colour. In the early ‘00s, Saville could tell you that teal and cerulean were the colours of flesh with no questions asked. In ‘Elpis’, a show at Gagosian New York, Saville’s palette had climbed a few octaves too high. The subjects were commercially beautiful faces with wide eyes and pursed lips, rolled in sickly fluorescence a la vacuous cosmetics ads, online avatars, Flickr streams and stock libraries, flanked by bilious yellows and play-dough greens. What?! I gawped at my laptop screen, before enduring what I now recognise as the five stages of grief.

You fool! How could you not see what she was doing? She was assessing the current human condition and translating it into something palpable, like she always has. In the 1990s it was the taboo of imperfection in an era of aesthetic perfection-seeking. Right now, it’s wrestling with the concurrent realities, fractured selves and crumbling truths of a digital world.

Then came ‘Ekkyklema’, her most recent show at Gagosian, Davies Street. Yes, it’s a show of pastels, and yes, some of the colours are lurid, but I’ve finally caught up, and am finally back under the spell.

Its title is an odd word that describes the wheeled platform used to move interior scenes onto the stages of ancient Greek tragedies. Reclining figures reference the mythological figure of Danaë, whose child, it was prophesied, would kill his grandfather, Acrisius, which he did. It’s a story that’s been captured by many a brush, including Titian, Artemisia Gentileschi and Gustav Klimt. But Saville works best combining something old with something new. Like her 2020 portrait, Virtual, her body parts are fractured into boxes. They look like the windows of technology: desktops, cut-out TV news broadcasts and the colossal screens used for large-scale event visuals. They evoke religious iconography; how they envelop, entrance and intoxicate. Saville asks viewers to believe in her version of reality, just as users willingly commit themselves as the algorithmic fodder of tech giants.

Saville was lured to the brightness of pastels – their flatness and refusal to mix. Orange for the violence of the sun and vivid, viscous blood; inside-out bodies strewn on crimson lakes. Get close, and the skin is all squiggles; nonsensical without its whole. Step back and it’s a tangle of orgied perfection.

Earlier this year, Saville found herself cooped up with Covid and turned her attention to Turner. She wanted to find out how he could turn paint into majesty. So she enrolled on a step-by-step watercolour course run by Tate (she also regularly watches craft tutorials on YouTube, the kind involving scotch tape). Any raised eyebrows come not from the fact that one of the most sought-after living painters should need to engage in such mere mortalism, it’s that she admits to it; a bit like how she admitted to disliking painting from life and instead prefers working from photographs. It’s a rebuff of lofty art school obsessions and an embracing of art as a set of hard skills; of knowledge and tools to be continually acquired and whetted.

Saville paints best with loud music in the quiet hours, when she is so exhausted that all rational thought shuts down – “on the edge of selfhood” as she put it during a walkthrough of her new show. “When I look at them I think ‘wow, I am a maniac.’ Because they are not the sort of colours I would expect myself to choose. So I went with the ugly a bit in order to access a sort of force. You cannot access this force by just being polite.”

If there’s any lesson here, it’s that people-pleasers rarely make good art. Almost 20 years since her book was published, Saville’s work has, understandably, moved on. But one constant is her rare ability to capture the human body’s relationship with Earth; a lip pulled down; a leg tilted just so; a stomach plummeting like a pendulum; a mind decimated by screens. So if there’s one word, it might be gravity, but Saville finds a way to defy even that.